Turning raw land into pasture land?
 

I have raw land and I want to turn about 20 acres to pasture for cows. After I clean up all the old logging leftovers off rake it then what? What attachments for the backhoe do I need? In what order should I do it? It's coverd in 3 year old growth now. Also it's in northern maine. How long should I expect it to take to come around? Tks benny

You know, I was about to author a thread about this very same subject. Thanks for doing it for me.

My hypothetical situation is wanting to transform former timberland, now cleared, into land useable for either pasture or row crops. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING ... I've read says "not financially viable."

Mind you, if you already own the land, and money is no object, it can be done.

I've been looking for land to start my own place, and the price per acre of cut down timberland is attractive. It's just the additional input required is so high.

I'm sure someone here has done this, with success. I'd love to hear their stories on how it was done.

Talk to a neighbor who has cows. You may need to do very little, just rotate the cows and let the tree roots die off. Some people put pigs in the pasture to dig it up. A local dairy farmer is probably going to know the land better than you do, and may even have the equipment that you need. Besides, a good way to find a friend and mentor.

Our pasture only had small trees on it, so discing was all that was needed. It self seeded and is a a good pasture, really better than necessary for sheep and donkeys.

For help from folks who know your area, talk to the local extension agent.

In some parts of this country, raw land is pasture.
Where is the water table?What is the soil type? What type of trees? What size stumps?

Around northern Michigan, 20 acres of logging acres would heat a house for 10 years and take a lot of days to cut and split. Mixed in with a thicket of 6 foot saplings, it would be unsuited for pasture.

Often times forested land is forested because it is unsuitable for pasture or crop land.
In my township, land close to lake level is sandy. Higher ground is muck and rocky. above that is gravel. Above that is level to slightly rolling clay loam. Above that is rocky. So, there are marginal pasture or hay lands near the lake. Brush and water tolerent trees. The clay loam is productive crop land and pasture. Above that is hardwoods. The hardwoods cannot be "converted" to pasture simply by removing the trees. The result would be rocky areas with no easy way to eradicate weeds and plant pasture grasses.

He was one of the first to discourage me with this approach. :-)

Well, after talking with the local expert, you came to us with limited information so we could offer a differing viewpoint?:grumble:

How about you come clean and tell us what you know? What did he tell you?:kung:

Me? Like Sgt. Schultz, I know nothing! :-)

http://i679.photobucket.com/albums/v...1262241779.jpg

While I agree with the agent, there can be alternative approaches applied to receive the same outcome - possibly with less cash or energy outlay. There is a wealth of knowledge within this forum, and I have no issue saying "I need your help." There is always a chance someone, somewhere, has experienced a situation that could possibly add value to someone else's life.

Just read forerunner's thread on composting. I have already picked up some good pointers there.

When I was up there I grabbed a couple handfuls of the soil it was a nice dark soil. There is man made pasture adjacent to the property I bought. It has mixed woods on it, it was select harvested 3 yrs ago. I could buy a dozer but I don't want to wile out the top soil. I wanted to use my hoe so I had less impact. I am gong to put some hogs on it right off but I don't know how much it would help on that much ground. I want to get a 2 milk cows on it ASAP. Or do you think I'd be better off with milking goats for a while(that may be a whole other thread). Lol. Benny

we turned cattle out on land that was pretty scrubby in parts and very thick in others - kept numbers low (cattle with calf operation of a neighbours)
they did a good job clearing it!

Wow, I can't believe no one thought to mention the 4-legged Brushhogs! Usually once a place is timbered, the brush goes crazy. You may plant grass and clover but the black berry, blueberry, Autumn (Russian) Olive, and Multifloral Rose spring up and choke out the grasses. Shoot, here in WV, someone thought it would be great to order some of that Japanese Honeysuckle from a catalog. Has a flower and smell just like honeysuckle, but it's a fast growing bush, not a vine . . . oops!

Goats thrive on brush. They hardly eat grass while there is any brush available. They don't get very big (200lbs vs. 1200) and they don't require any special hardware (like a corral, chute, and headgate). The downside to goats is that they require good fencing (preferably electrified), are vulnerable to predators (coyotes, dogs, etc), require a supplemental source of copper (i.e. bolus) and need their hooves trimmed if the ground isn't rocky enough. Depending on how deep your snow gets, you may need to bring the goats into a barn or corral and feed hay. They really don't do well once the snow gets over a foot deep

Oh, and they're just so darn cute :D

In Michigan, the Soil Conservation Service has soil maps. If this property is the same soil type as the neighbor's new pasture, then you might be able to do it. But if it has swamp issues, maybe not.
I agree with you on not using a bulldozer due to top soil losses.
You can take some soil in for soil tests. Might be too acid, requiring much lime, adding greatly to your costs.
I used a backhoe to remove a hundred white sprice on a 60 acre field. How many stumps and trees and what size are they?
It woulld take many goats to brouse 20 acres to the point of killing 3 year old regrowth. Quite a few cattle, too.
When a big tree is harvested, the mature root system remains. The resulting new growth has the huge root system to grow from. Regrowth is generally rapid.

Backhoe, brush hog and chemical brush killer would be my choice. Rotational grazing might put enough pressure on the saplings, but then the rest of the property may get beyond control.

Lots of stumps, mixed woods were on it ( lot of pine) . Ok let me ask you this I have another property right down the road(800) foot away. Would I be better off to timber say 10 acres of it and put hogs and goats on it right away before under growth starts?

Benny, if you have the hoe and money for diesel, Id just start working a strip and see what grows back.

East Texas is about as bad at growing back in regrowth as you will see, but there are 1000s of acres of beautiful pasture there that was cleared off and is now grazed. .

You could raise goats and let them do a big part of the work for you. Use your dozer to clear a fence line. Apply at the extension office for financial help with fencing material. Goats will eat brush down to the nub.
Goats sell higher than cattle here.

Financial office? Money for fencing? Got my full attention tab. Lol I don't know what extension office.

Sorry I didn't mean not to answer the rest of you guys , tab just threw me for a loop I never got nothin free before. Lol. So you thing goats would be better to start off with than pigs? Will they live together ? Or not ? The guy we just bought 78 acres off of(just closed today) owns a large timber co. Said he is real busy in the winter I could get work off him over the winter, so I'm feeling real good about the move.

I have cleared many acres of timber ground for pasture. I used a cat with a brush rake after popping the stumps out. If big stumps you need a big cat. A backhoe will dig out stumps but is very slow if there are a lot of stumps or they are big. After using the brush rake you need a heavy disk, Then a lot of work picking up sticks and roots if you want nice level pasture or to be able to cut for hay. Cheapest ans easiest way is to spray the land and seed grasses and clover between and around the stumps and turn the cows out when it is established....James

This, I have recovered almost 70 acres using this method, my dozer guy is an artist.

What's your thoughts on a komatsu dozer. Like a 31. Any good or a throwaway?

I have only ran a 300 excavator and it was a good reliable machine but your milage may vary...lol

Just today I finished converting 5 acres of pine plantation into a cleared pasture. Loggers cut the trees for pulp. I pulled HUNDREDS of stumps with a backhoe. This pasture was where the loggers loaded the trees onto the trucks. So all the limbs and tops from a 40 acre thinning and 5 acre clear cut were stacked 1 to 4 feet deep over 4 of the pasture acres.

I made piles and burned numerous times, but the sand had built up in the piles so the burns were very slow. A pile would smolder for a month and then I would tear it apart, move the remains to another pile and burn again. I liked the slow burn because it made lots of char that got spread and incorporated into the soil.

While my surface soil is sand, 1 to 5 feet deep is red clay. No rocks anywhere here, so my stumps probably come out easier than in Maine. After pulling stumps, I mixed the sand, clay, and char and somewhat leveled the field with a root rake. After about 4 passes with the root rake going north/south, east/west, and on the diagonals, I still missed dozens of stumps which revealed themselves only after discing and dragging. I used a grader blade on a tractor to level difficult spots, used a york rake to pull out sticks, and still had to hire locals to walk the fields to pile sticks and then haul them off in a dump cart.

Equipment needed: backhoe, loader bucket, root rake, kubota tractor, disc, york rake, drag harrow, dump trailer, and everything broke multiple times during the August to January process. Bonus equipment includes an ATV to run back and forth on the property and to the mechanic who is 1.5 miles away, close enough to drive the backhoe and tractor when they break. A dozer may have been more efficient, but when I bought the backhoe, it was the most machine I could find that I could pull with an F350 truck and 22K lb trailer (backhoe 17K lbs, trailer 5K lbs). The trailer is needed to go to paying jobs and a service shop when the local backyard mechanic couldn't fix things.

I probably have 2000 man hours in the project when I include my time, all the time I was provided for free by generous neighbors and labor at $8/hr to a couple of locals who are otherwise unemployed. While a 4 inch stump pulls out in one dig of the hoe, a 12 inch stump that branches 5 feet below the surface to produce 3 tap roots can take 2 hours.

All this was done so that the lady of the house and the gentleman below are happy for the next 20 years. Additional pasture was created as silvapasture; the pines thinned by 50 - 60% in order to allow the pines to grow to saw timber size while allowing enough sun to grow grass. Because that area had fewer stumps and less slash, it has been much easier to clean up, though the discing and dragging still needs to be done in that 10 acre section. A 100 acre section has been more or less thinned and has another 4 acres of slash piles. This slash will be left to compost and will have manure, dead animals, etc to accelerate the rot. The 100 acres will be converted to cattle/goat/pig silvapasture, so I'm not worrying about stumps there. It's just the horse area that stumps are verbotten.

The moral, clearing for hay quality pasture ground is WAY TOO expensive to justify in and of itself. For cattle, see if one of the experts around here will agree that cattle can just graze amongst your stumps. I have plenty of native bahia that grows in the pines just as long as the canopy remains open enough for sunshine to reach the ground and the pine straw isn't allowed to pile too deep. But the stumps and trees will more than halve my livestock pounds/acre, so you have to figure in that as a cost in efficiency if not out of pocket expense.

And I should add, I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I'm a rank amateur at all this and I have no doubt made many mistakes that a more experienced and knowledgeable person would not have. I got the best advice I could find at the time and learned as I went.

http://www.sheepscreek.com/rural/pasture.html

This is a good read on pasture ground.

You will need to trade cost with time on this. If you want a flat pretty pasture of lush grass in 2 years, you'll be spending lots of money.

If you can clear off a perimiter, and then clear an arce now and then, you will get a pasture sooner or later, lot cheaper. Add better grass seed and fertility as you go along over the years, let a big stump here and there to rot itself out...

Depends what you want and how fast.

Now, I'd be concerned why the 'expert' said this wasn't a good idea. Sometimes experts sit behind a desk too long and down't know, but sometimes they have a good handle on some issues.... Is it too steep, too wet, the ground is too shallow, or too poor.....

Forest soils and prairie soils are very different, and if this is a forest, it might not want to turn into a prairie soil for grasses, so without knowing anything about it, I'm scared to tell you to just push forward....

--->Paul

Very nice; thanks!

Liked the answers. Thanks. I do have to figure something out. A big part of our justifying the cost of the land is to raise our own food. The land payment on 128 acres is over $ 800 a month. If the goats and hogs don't need a real nice pasture. I should stick with those for a year or two, and set a goal of two acres a year of cleared ground ready to pasture. I could live with that. Shouldn't the leaves falling all those years make some nice soil? I gotta figure out how much acres I'm going to need to get a milk cow going exactly. Benny

I have had several projects that span decades, but you have saplings that already have a three year head start on you and some that will become trees by the time you get to them. They will be growing faster than you will be clearing.

Leaves do break down and create soil, but it is a very slow process. In the past 10,000 years since the last ice age, my soil has gained 6 inches of soil from composted leaves.

If you would kill the brush and re-growth from the stumps, stop their rapid gains, then as you work towards your goal, each year the stumps will be more rotted, making your job of removing stumps increasingly easier, instead of more difficult.

FWIW: Goats and Pigs coexist rather well . . . until you start supplementing their feed. As long as the weather is good and the snow shallow and the forage plenty, they will do well.

The problem is when the snow starts to pile up. You will want separate paddocks for the goats and pigs. This winter, after being on forage all summer, my goats are doing well on just hay. A lard type pig with a nice layer of insulation (fat) will also do rather well on just hay, but a larger frame bacon type pig (i.e. Yorkshire, Berkshire, Duroc, etc) will grow better with whey, kitchen scraps, and/or grain . . . and that's the problem.

Grain in general and corn in particular is hard on goats. The extra starches can cause bloat, acidosis and (in males) urinary calculi (i.e. small kidney stones that accumulate in the end of the urinary tract). While the goats and pigs can share hay, the goats will kill themselves trying to get into any grain given to the pigs.

Instead of grain for goats, if you really want to give them a treat, or if they need to improve their body condition, try a 50/50 mix of alfalfa pellets (for protein) and Black Oil Sunflower Seeds (BOSS -- for oil/fat). As long as they have free choice hay (or pasture) it will help them gain body condition without the dangerous side effects of grain. The only time I feed any grain is when I have a nursing doe in the paddock.

The only other problem with having pigs and goats together is the salt/minerals. Large amounts of salt are lethal to pigs since they can't process it efficiently. Since goats don't mind climbing, I just keep my feeders higher than the pigs can reach.

I have a option for you, hire or rent a skidsteer with a mulcher grinder on the front run it through your property it will grind the stumps down to 6" deep, mulch up limbs & small trees. Afterwards drag with a rake behind your tractor to level the ground. Soil test, sow seed and let nature take over. This was a cost effective way for me to convert small cutovers to pasture. I hired a company with a forestry mulcher that did 5 acres which was way cheaper than a dozer and burning stump piles, picking up roots & limbs.

Ironbutt, any idea of the cost to hire a forestry mulcher? or what it would cost to hire a forestry company to go thru that five acres?

I didn't have near the acreage that you do; but we put 3 Dorper sheep on our woodlland (2.5 acres) that we wanted to turn into pasture. They clean up VERY NICELY and keep the new growth off the stumps and clean up any brambles. They helped to keep the unwanted brushy stuff down while I worked on clearing, burning deadfall, and planting. We worked in sections and used electric fencing to corral the sheep as we worked on new areas.

I've been reading on milking goats. I think they will fill my needs over cows for a little while. So your saying keep their food up higher? Hay in the winter sounds easy enough. I only want to keep one sow and one bore over the winter for a little till I get more ground clear. What do you guys think about Russian type hogs? A guy from upper Michigan had them and said they could just about live all winter up there by themselves. He was having a lot of trouble with the state about having hogs outdoors. Hope it works out for him. I had a bobcat t300 and rented a mulcher for it to do some work, it chewed up the smaller stuff good but the bigger stuff it was pretty slow. The guy I bought the land off has a a logging co. I'll see what he got.

I don't have much experience with northern hardwood forests, but I am doing this in Georgia with a pine forest. So, my experience may be more applicable to YamahaRick, but maybe it can help you too, Benny.

First, as has been mentioned, once cleared, your biggest problem will be keeping the brush down. We have 20 acres that was "cleared" by forest fire in 2008/9 before we bought our property. The result was a lot of large stumps, logs and brush piled up in windrows, with baby pines planted between them in 2009. Fast forward 4-5 years, the stumps are rotted - if you hit them with a tractor tire, they disintigrate. But the scrub oak is 6-10 ft tall, baby pines 5-8 ft tall. If the area had been bush-hogged to keep the brush down, or if goats or cattle had been turned loose in there, the brush would have been kept down, and the native grasses would be much better established.

At this point, I am just starting to bush-hog it, but am way behind, and the brush is really thick. But with a heavy bushhog, I can still cut down 90% of it -anything under 3 inches, and that the tractor can push over (its only an old 45 hp old MF 245, but it handles a 5ft heavy bush-hog just fine). I would hate to think what it would be next year - I doubt my tractor would be able to handle it. As it is, it's been slow going, but I've managed to clear about 15 acres in the past 6 weeks working a few hours per weekend.

We have just cleared an additional ~10 acres. This time, since I own the property, I am trying to stay ahead of the brush. We are planting clover, pearl millet and buckwheat this spring, and putting up fences. If not this fall, then by next spring we should be able to gett some hair sheep or goats out there. Next year will be winter rye and next spring bahia grass. When the grass gets better established, I plan to transition to cattle.

The biggest question is how long you can wait for your pastures to be established, and the stumps to rot. If you don't want to wait, you have to spend cash (lots of it) to either hire / rent a forest mulcer or bull dozer or other heavy equipment. If you have time, you can use animals to keep the brush down, but a tractor and bush hog is very helpful (I would even say indispensable)

So, it is possible to convert pine forest to pasture

Great post Ironbutt! This is the kind of info/insight I am looking for.

For your contribution, buy yourself some of this - I bet you may already have some*.

http://uncrate.com/p/2008/05/anti-mo...utt-powder.jpg

* - in motorcycling world, ironbutt describes a person who rides long distances, much more than average. Hence the need for the powder.

If possible, I'd love to stop by your place one day.

Mulcher/grinder: I'd love to have one of these ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la6iLKiUc0A

My property was a farm that was just left to get over grown. I had some good pasture acres that just needed a few brush hoggings and good to go. Some had timber growing on it. My neighbor, who is 70, told me lots of my land used to be good pasture. He showed me where through the forest it used to be pasture and you know after he showed me I could pretty much see it. So I've been cutting back trees and brush, using the timber to heat my house and pushing back the woods to make more pasture. I don't know how far I'll get, maybe a few acres more or less...maybe more IDK. But basically all that I've need to do is cut the trees and brush then brush hog it down and native grass'll grow. Thats the beauty of grass, you give it a competitive advantage when you mow. Mowing is the best thing you can do 4 your pastures I'm convinced, not enough people do it and you can tell because they have all kinds of tall raggy looking weeds mixed in.

agreed on the mowing. Where the DW used to keep her horse, the owner is most likely a fine mortgage loan officer but just plain iggnert when it comes to pasture mgmt. He refused to mow the pastures on the theory that it was free food and that eventually the horses would chow down on the 2 - 3 ft tall weeds. Of course, the higher and woodier those weeds got, the less the horses were interested. DW tried to educate him but to no avail. She and horse eventually went to a better managed stable.

Ive been working on my own existing pastures for 2 years, mowing 2 - 3 times per year and allowing strips to get taller and go to seed for the wild turkey. Without livestock (I don't live there full time yet) to mow for me, I have to machine mow and the grasses have gotten visibly more lush with no other inputs.

The company that did 5 acres for me charged me $3,500.00 The cutover was yellow pine & assorted hardwoods. When they finished it looked like a bog disc had been run over it.

Also when you run cows on new pasture .Buy yourself a goat to run with them. The goat will eat any tree sprouts and weeds that the cows will ignore ,I found that this is more economical than spraying 2-4-D...